Writing Poetry Like Pros

Need some ideas for poetry lessons? Check out this packet loaded with suggestions for elementary, middle, and high school writers.

Upper elementary learners discover classic and contemporary poetry. They read several poems, discover the power of performing them, and analyze the different parts that make the poems work. At the end, they use what they learned to...

The best poetry writing lesson of all time is here for you! Learn all about the art of exaggeration with a lesson on exaggeration poems, which instructs students to use wild imagery to convey their message.

Invite learners to introduce themselves through poetry. After brainstorming and choosing details, pupils draft two acrostic poems using their names as the base. They then evaluate and revise their poems.

Use Mattie Stepanek’s Heartsongs book of poetry to inspire young poets to write about their own lives, experiences, and feelings. After reading the introduction to Mattie’s book, in which he talks about himself and his reasons for...

Add a little fun and fancy to English language arts with an activity that challenges scholars to write a limerick. Authors follow five rules in order to compose an original poem that contains a specific rhyme scheme. 

If your students made a list of their favorite things, would writing poetry be on it? After this poetry writing lesson, it might! Young writers make a list of what they like—or what they don't like—before crafting the list into a rhyming...

You've got your topic—now how do you make your poem funny? Explore ways to make a poem humorous, including puns, exaggeration, silly words, and surprising endings, with a helpful poetry lesson.

If you like poetry, wait till you try backward poetry! Young writers read Shel Silverstein's "Backward Bill" before writing their own funny poems that are full of backward imagery and phrasing.

Two exercises boost scholars' knowledge of a onomatopoeia with excerpts from famous poems. In exercise one, participants circle onomatopoeia words. Exercise two challenges writers to choose three words to use in an original poem.